[Music] All right, on to our third spotlight project. I want to bring on Cynthia to tell you about the future of e-commerce. Please give Cynthia for Primer a big round of applause.
Hi everyone, I'm Cynthia. I'm a second year at Stanford. I'm from the US and I'm here to talk about primer pay. So just for context, there's three of us on our team. I'm Cynthia.
My teammates Rashab and Aaron are outside. We come from three different universities, three different blockchain clubs, but somehow us young builders gathered together to tackle one problem together and that is the future of e-commerce and payments. Um I think to fully understand our product and how we got here in New Delhi on my second week of school, I think it's important to understand uh where we came from. So how I started was in June or July of this year, Ethereum House and SF invited me to give a talk on the future of crypto UX. And there I think I accidentally started a debate by saying that to young builders decentralization doesn't matter as much as you think it does.
And a lot of people pushed back on the idea asking like why and decentralization is the entire point of crypto. But the reality is that the next generation of crypto apps for more mainstream adoption um have to abstract away the transaction details. And what I mean by that is that you can't I'm not convinced that um wallet ids or even just payments in general right now is the future of how consumers will pay. In the US specifically, crypto payments are a nice to have rather than a pain point. However, in emerging markets, this is rarely the case.
Um, of course, in India, there's a lot of people using stable coins on a daily basis. There is a growing demand for stable coin payments on just general technology in general, as well as price differences. I had a lot of really good conversations with people today about where they would want to see stable coin adoption. And this is where I really came to appreciate the bridge between web 2 and web 3. There I went to New York in August for the ritual uh fellowship.
I study more AI and crypto and then I went to ETH global New York where I met my co-founders Aaron and Rashab there we were able to build primer and I think starting with e-commerce um there are a lot of challenges and opportunities that we wanted to tackle right now the moment of intent from product discovery to checkout has not yet been fully unlocked. You may see a product on your screen there's no affiliate link there's no way to purchase it. Maybe the merchants don't ship directly to your country or there's high fees and taxes and right now you can't really use stable coins to buy normal consumer products or even something more expensive like a laptop because of high fees and the op ramping fee in India I believe is 30% as someone told me today and right now there's also a paradox of choice there are a lot of rails out there including credit cards to stable coins but with that um crypto feels a little bit disconnected from the wider market of actually purchasing a product and a lot of people talk about AI agents I think this is the future of commerce. But right now, if you ask PGPT, for example, for a product recommendation, it doesn't really give you anything. It shows you a bunch of options that may not fit what you want and you're not able to check out from there, much less check out with stable coins if that's your preferred rail, especially in emerging markets.
And also right now merchants last lack trustable infrastructure is even in India from what I learned just this morning um there is like for cash on on delivery someone told me that there's um 30 30% of transactions never actually go through because either the customer doesn't pay or something happens in the middle so obviously there are a lot of challenges with e-commerce and I don't feel like we fully solved them and I think the opportunity comes to build a more conversational and general intelligence layer for the future of e-commerce and what I mean by that is having some sort of uni universal aggregation layer that connects all your receipts, all your purchases, lets you check out with any from thing from credit cards to stable coins to other tokens and just central just like puts that together in a more cohesive platform. And Primark didn't actually start off with this grand idea. We started off um just by looking at the bullish industry in general. Uh recently Y Combinator which is a major startup accelerator in San Francisco announced a kind of partnership with base and they were calling they were requesting startups for fintech 3.0 and they're looking for more onchain startups like tokenization AI agents transacting and stable coins and in addition Google announced their agent payment protocol which has been partnered with a variety of different companies out there.
If you search on X it's almost everywhere. So we think the time is right to fully build on this platform and there are a lot of exciting opportunities out there. What we ended up building at ETH Global New York and what we what we have been working on is essentially a Chrome extension that lets you pay with stable coins on Amazon. We did this first by reverse engineering Amazon site as obviously Amazon doesn't take stable coins. We injected a button that said check out with crypto so it feels very native to Amazon's UX.
We care a lot about design choices and making sure we meet consumers where they actually are. And it takes you to a new site. You can send stable coins to a merchant wallet. Um, obviously we have Coinbase wallet, other wallets there, but for the purpose of this demo, we are showing just one. And you would connect to your wallet same way you would do normally.
And once the transaction goes through later on in the video, um we the hack we did at ET Global New York was that we converted the stable coins into gift cards on the back end and applied those car those codes to your account. So in this way we were able to let you natively check out an Amazon without having to actually integrate API with Amazon. Now, since the month that we had after ETH global New York, after we won finalist in the Coinbase bounty, we did get the Amazon incentives API to make converting to gift cards and just converting to stable coins a lot smoother than we did before. We have explored other options obviously with companies converting crypto to gift cards. There are a wide variety of options out there, but this is just the beginning.
I we believe in targeting a small market which is getting crypto users to be able to pay st on stable coins on Amazon or maybe even having a Shopify plugin later and expanding to the more mainstream market. I think even though it's a nice to have in the US, this is definitely something that people would use in other markets and this is what we're truly targeting. So as you can see the purchase pretty much went through. This was on mainet. So I think in New York we had like five different orders accidentally shipped to us as we were testing but it was just a proof of concept and since then we've really iterated it on a lot.
So the current flow that we're matching right now we have a landing page of course I'll show in the next slide but for now we have users input all the information they need pretty much to be able to transact on our website. We prompt them to download the Chrome extension or like use the Chapa interface and then we have a we have an idea for what we may want to go next. If you want to go the AI route there, we can pretty much make our own AI interface on our website. So, we don't rely on any merchant. You can drop a link, drop a picture, and or even ask like, "Oh, I want an air fryer like under $40 that fits these very specific requirements."
And we give that to you, and you're able to do one-click checkout um in our platform. This is one route that we are considering going, but we think the main value proposition of primer is still the payments angle because I don't think anyone has truly unlocked the power of like stable coin payments when it comes to normal consumer use cases and this is a very big market that we are trending towards especially with institutional crypto adoption. We see this in the news all the time of course like AI agents um AI agents are a big factor. Um, for example, if you want AI agents to scour the internet for you to like look at research papers, these are like penny by penny transactions and credit cards aren't built to handle this. So, the natural solution is stable coins, which is where the concept like Google's agent payment protocol and exports came in.
So, with all with the industry trending direction, we are very excited to continue solving the issue of e-commerce and payments. We think it will be more digitized than ever with a lot with the majority of product discovery happening outside traditional platforms outside of traditional marketplaces as well. We think the future of e-commerce won't be a new marketplace actually. It'll be something that fits indirectly where consumers already are and that is the important part of primer and the important part of focusing on making the UX as seamless as possible in any sort of payments project. This is also our landing page.
We have a booth outside where we are looking to talk to as many people as possible. I think really just understanding more consumer demand and what people hope the future to look like. I've had a lot of very good conversations today and I hope to have some more. But in terms of next steps, these are RX Telegram. The current code takes you to our landing page.
I believe we're very excited to continue iterating on these ideas. Um, we have a growing weight list and we have been tinkering on our demo for quite some time, experimenting with platforms like Amazon, Crossman, Coinbase, other things. We use the data APIs for Coinbase for initial demo and we're very excited to see where the future of e-commerce takes us. Thank you so much. [Music]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.